Wednesday 23rd Feb

Transactions in .NET 2.0 - Ingo Rammer - http://www.thinktecture.com/staff/ingo/weblog/

Ingo's session covered the present methods of coding transactional components (explicit transactions, implicit transactions using Enterprise Services) and a quick refresher on the DTC and Two-Phase Commit. The .NET 2.0 framework has a new namespace called System.Transactions which provides enhanced support for distributed transactions without the need to inherit from ServicedComponent. The session described the new TransactionScope class which is used in local and distributed implicit transactions and the Transaction class which provides support for explicit transactions. All in all a very good session.

Extending the VS.NET IDE - John Robbins - http://www.wintellect.com/about/instructors/default.aspx#2

The session starting with an intro to building VS.NET macros to automate simple tasks in the IDE. Next we moved onto the IDE extensibility model and all the IDE objects that can be got at e.g. solution and project access, output windows, text manipulation and so on. The session also covered the different types of events that macros and AddIns can be notified of when things happen in the IDE. The last part of the session then covered building fully fledged VS.NET addins and importantly how to overcome some of the hurdles the VS.NET team put in your way when getting started doing this. Another good session and I left with plenty of food for thought on building some addins of my own....yet another SQL Stored Procedure Parameter code generator maybe :) ?

ASP.NET 2.0 Configuration and Instrumentation - Jeff Prosise - http://www.wintellect.com/about/instructors/default.aspx#1

Excellent session covering the new ASP.NET MMC snap-in and WebAdmin.axd tools for configuring ASP.NET which should take the pain out of managing the machine.config and your app's web.config files. We then moved onto the new configuration API features which provide the ability to read and write configuration settings. This API is used by the MMC and WebAdmin.axd tools and gives the programmer strongly typed access to configuration sections. There are too many new neat things to list but I recommend digging around the expanded System.Configuration and System.Web.Configuration namespaces. Next in the session we got into the new ASP.NET 2.0 instrumentation capabilities that provide enhancements such as new perf counters (25 new ones), Windows Event Tracing which facilitates end-to-end tracing of requests through the ASP.NET system and application tracing improvements. We then covered the new config section and HeartBeat event which can be fired at user defined intervals and can be used to gather vital info about the state of your app. The session ended with a couple of demo's on building custom web events that can be wired up to the health monitoring features. One neat one was to ensure that your web.config section (new) was always encrypted.

Script it With ASP.NET 2.0 - Dino Esposito - http://www.wintellect.com/about/instructors/default.aspx#5

Last session of the day and my first proper ASP.NET 2.0 one. Dino covered new features such as script callbacks that allow a page to update it's content without performing a full page refresh, cross page scripting that allow one page to post form values back to a different page, the new HtmlHead class which allows easier access to the tag and its contents, the enhanced HttpBrowserCapabilities class, the new Page.ClientScript property which is used to inject script into ASP.NET pages and  finally the new SetFocus() method of the Page class which permits the programmer to assign the initial input focus on a page to the control of his choice..

All in all a pretty interesting day.